Elastic Stack 5.1.1 Released

Let’s begin by addressing any confusion that may arise. It is our first minor release since the heady days of 5.0.0 and it is version 5.1.1.

Yup, you read that right. Version 5.1.0 doesn’t exist because, for a short period of time, the Elastic Yum and Apt repositories included unreleased binaries labeled 5.1.0. To avoid any confusion, and upgrade issues for the people that have installed these without realizing, we have decided to skip the 5.1.0 version and release 5.1.1 instead.

It is, again, a substantive release with features and functionality in nearly all areas of the Elastic Stack. And, as per usual, it is available – right now – on Elastic Cloud.

Elasticsearch

For more detailed information, and many other features, peruse the Elasticsearch detail post.

Reindex gets faster, much faster, by allowing multiple workers to run in parallel

Task manager gives you the ability to cancel long-running searches

Multiple Painless enhancements, including simplified debugging

If you haven’t yet upgraded to enjoy the features of Elasticsearch 5.x. As a reminder, we’ve also released the Migration Helper, which runs on your existing 2.3 cluster. Use this site plugin to prep for your migration.

NOTE: A previous version of this post included the statement ‘New field/query type allows for indexing and querying time ranges easily and efficiently’ which is a future feature and erroneously included.

Kibana

‘Visualize’ all the features, and ‘Discover’ more information in the detail post.

We never knew how much we hated borders until we removed them in 5.0. We never knew how much we loved tag clouds until we added a visualization 5.1.1

Rendering speed is up, CPU usage is down, and Discover can better handle fields with tons of data and indexes with tons of fields

Logstash

Many highly requested features make an appearance in this release. For more information, grok the detail post.

Say ‘Heya’ to Persistent Queues. Now released in Beta.

We’ve made inspecting your pipeline even easier with the introduction of a slowlog.

The Date Filter has been enhanced and is 2.5x faster for all cases!

Beats

We may collect data from the edge, but all the updates are in a single Beats detail post.

Metricbeat gets even more useful by adding a Docker module.

One new module wasn’t enough, the Kafka module arrives in 5.1.1 as well.

Want to enrich each event with instance metadata from a hosting provider? You’ll <3 the add_cloud_metadata_processor

X-Pack

X-Pack gains a new feature in the Search Profiler. This is discussed, in some detail, in the Kibana post. At its simplest, the profiler UI is an easy way to visualize where time is being spent during search requests. Your slowlog will be a mystery no longer! Even better, this is available for free as part of X-Pack with a Basic license.

Continuing in the same vein of updates to Basic license features, we have updated the Monitoring feature of X-Pack to include an advanced view. Even more charts to help you monitor the health of your cluster. With more charts comes more questions, so we also added tooltips to the Monitoring charts.